The Idea of the Village

Dear Friends,




In this blog entry, I'd like to convey some of the ideas that have been developed about the characteristics of villages to be built in this project.



Why a village at all? While most humans have lived in villages (settlements of 500-5000) for most of human history, the last century has seen a strong and continuing trend to urbanization, recently passing a milestone in which about half the global population now lives in cities. Many who live in villages would rather live in cities, especially in the low income countries, where cities offer better education, better health care, more stimulus and novelty, sometimes greater acceptance of diversity. Yet nostalgia for whatever people imagine a village represents is readily apparent. Bits of cities are often wistfully labelled 'villages', as are retirement homes and gated communities. What is it people long for?


This particular village idea of the Sustainable Settlements group is a response to the complex global ecological and economic crisis of climate change, coming oil scarcity and other resource depletion. The thinking behind it is that humans are very rapidly degrading the Earth's capacity to support many species, including ourselves, and we must learn to respect and live within the biophysical limits of this capacity. It is not only the ominous climate change effects of greenhouse gases, it is degradation and depletion of fresh water, of soil, of fish stocks, of coastal ecosystems and so on. It is the addition to the ecosphere of chemical and radioactive substances foreign to it, and of genetic combinations that did not evolve in the web of life, but in the laboratory, and have unknown effects on the web.


The thinking behind this village development includes an awareness that an adequate response to the climate change crisis entails a need to stop and eventually perhaps reverse the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This obviously means minimising the use of fossil fuels. The peaking of oil supply will support this process, but, as a result of inadequate planning for it, it is likely to cause severe economic disruption in the short term. It is important that populations, whether rural or urban, plan for so-called 'post-carbon' living.


Technological development, especially in alternative energy resources, will be part of the solution to these challenges, but this needs to be done very carefully. Since the unthinking application of technology has got us into this species-threatening mess, we need to appraise very carefully the impact of old and new technologies on the web of life over time. We, the group working on this project, believe that both the need to respond to climate change and the need to prepare for peak oil are urgent issues. We think it is unlikely that alternative energy sources will be able to fill the gap that will grow between demand for energy at current rates of consumption and supply. Even if projected levels of energy demand could be met at some time in the future, we contend that use of that energy to move and change matter in the biosphere will unbearably strain its biophysical limits to a point incompatible with supporting large human populations.



We are convinced that alternative energy sources, though important, will not solve our fundamental problems, and that we must experiment with different ways of living. We need to live so as to move ourselves and our goods around much less, that is, we need to be closer to the sources of supply of our basic material needs. We need to use less energy generally and to take care of water, soil, wood and so on, with lower material throughputs in our economies.



In addition, since about a third of excess carbon in the atmosphere comes from changes in agricultural practices exacerbated by cheap oil, we need to move quickly to take care of the soil in such a way that it becomes a carbon 'sink' and not a carbon 'emitter'. Returning organic matter to the soil through 'no-till' methods and other agriculture methods is crucial, urgent and scarcely mentioned in general discourse on this topic. The technologies for this are known, but as with cheap oil, government subsidies are perverse and keep the wrong practices going. The agricultural practices that will accomplish this are more labour-intensive. They would reverse the global trend to rural depopulation. There needs to be reruralization of the land.



Over the last 30-40 years, the idea of agriculture that works with Nature rather than dominating and 'denaturing' Nature has developed. One of these developments, Permaculture, originating in Australia, has now been applied successfully around the world. It demonstrates the capacity to restore damaged land and to enable growing food on poor and marginal land. Its 'healing' of the soil entails the soil holding, instead of releasing, carbon in organic matter, thus extracting it from the atmosphere. It has a strong focus on knowledge - of land, water cycles, natural energy systems and storages, species that benefit humans, evolution of manmade ecosystems and the need for constant study of the land. I'll say more about Permaculture in a future blog.



Here, of course, is where the idea of village fits - a human settlement where people learn to live with lower consumption of energy and materials, to grow food, fuel, fibre and building materials near to where they use them, by means of agricultural systems that restore rather than damage land and improve natural carbon sequestration.



They will need to

• live in well-insulated and smaller houses with passive solar heating


• grow food close by with more intensive land-care, although not necessarily more laborious agriculture


• rehabilitate land to better support human settlements by use of Permaculture technologies, restoring fertility, productivity and beauty.


• restore native habitat in some areas, thus preserving species

This will mean people will be more closely connected to the land that supports them, and will be more aware of how many it can support.

This way of living, whether done in rural or suburban areas, cannot be done by isolated families very easily or effectively. It needs a community, and a highly knowledgeable one. There needs to be expertise in hydrology, soil, Permaculture, botany, food processing and preservation, ecology, land management, land and forest restoration, animal husbandry, architecture, business, economics, small scale democracy, conflict resolution, political advocacy, education and research in a range of areas.

But large, dense conurbations of many millions of people, hundreds of kilometres from their food sources, with infrastructure needing high energy inputs, may find it difficult to reduce their fossil fuel dependence and their dependence on destructive carbon and methane-emitting agricultural practices. This kind of human settlement is possible only with high energy inputs, which are unlikely to be available in the future.

While historically, villages grow organically and slowly, experiments along the lines decribed need to take place rapidly, and with the expectation of errors. It will be an advantage to have multiple experiments, and systems of rapid learning from each other. There are Permaculture villages in Africa, India and other developing countries from whom to learn.

There are aspects of this transformation that may seem unattractive at first glance - less car use, growing one's own food, smaller houses, travelling much less. What about access to high culture and higher education and the stimulus of city life?

We need to consider that some of the health problems of urban life, obesity, diabetes etc., are closely related to ways we transport and feed ourselves. And what is it that people long for in the idea of 'village'? Most clearly, they long for community, to be part of a small population of people that belong to a place and take care of it and each other. Is it possible to have great intellectual stimulus, higher education and high culture in such settings? There is clearly enormous intellectual stimulus in the application of a whole range of abilities to the problems to be solved in living in a way that doesn't hurt the Earth. Villages generate arts in music, dance, visual art. ( A good deal of the cultural and intellectual activity we've participated in over the last six weeks has been centred in Riverside, a nearby community far smaller than a village, but with a 65 year tradition.) Christopher Mare, who has studied human settlements from a historical perspective, claims that the two most sustainable civilizations in human history, classic Egyptian and Mayan, were village-based. They both comprised clusters of villages that related to centres of religious activity. These civilizations generated some of the world's most impressive architecture, visual art and intellectual accomplishment. Regarding higher education, young people may continue to benefit from travel to centres of higher education; technologies of distance education advance continually.

It will be important to demonstrate that a Permaculture village is an attractive way of life. Currently, very large numbers of people are acutely aware of global ecological problems and willing to act on them. But beyond blue boxes and light bulbs, they often don't know how. The technologies of a Permaculture village can be partly applied to suburbs and to small towns or less dense areas of cities. Retrofitting houses, converting land to grow food in or near urban areas, working near to home and public transportation will be part of what needs to be done. But it will also be important to get more people on to the land to reverse that one-third contribution to greenhouse gases and sequester carbon in soil.

All of this is not a sufficient response to either the climate change crisis or the problems of peak oil. Political advocacy at all levels from local to global is needed. Issues of carbon tax, transportation, land use, housing, economic incentives and many more require social action. This action may be more powerful if it comes from people and groups who are living the solutions to the problems.